30,000 troops and 30 billion dollars
The transcript of Obama’s much anticipated decision to send more troops to Afghanistan is out. You can find it here among other places. After a quick read I have only a few remarks:
1. Obama completely glosses the US role in the destabilization of Afghanistan and its direct responsibility for the rise of Al Qaeda.
2. Those of you who have read Woods’ essay will likely hear echoes of her criticisms of “democracy as the ideology of empire”:
And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights, and tend to the light of freedom and justice and opportunity and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the moral source of America’s authority.
* * *
For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for – and what we continue to fight for – is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.
3. He has totally rejected the notion of a political settlement which would include the Taleban.
4. Obama makes a vague gesture at increasing military aid to Pakistan though he does not specify what shape that aid will take. Predator drones?
5. Is it possible that the US will increase its “overseas contingency operations” in Somalia and Yemen?
Where al-Qaida and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.
6. Despite the fact that only a few weeks ago James Jones suggested there were as few as 80 or 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, Obama chooses to emphasize them as a threat.
The Reading
You’ve got the reading, right? If not, you can download it from this link:
Cracking Empire
Cracking the Empire
Keywords:
1. Political terms, including euphemisms (marked with *)
Empire, obviously.
And collateral terms:
imperial, imperialism, colonial, colonialism, colonization, neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism (?)
militarization
democracy
ideology
*special administrative measures
*extraordinary rendition
*enhanced interrogation techniques (i.e., torture) including water boarding, shackling, hooding, stress positions
KUBARK
war on terror (GWOT, GSAVE, WW IV)
“overseas contingency operations”
geostrategy
neoconservatism
2. Economic
Globalization or Globalism?
neoliberalism (neoclassical economics)
IMF (World Bank)
WTO
private contractor (i.e. mercenary)
Blackwater (Xe) Titan, CACI, et al.
3. Military terms, including euphemisms (marked with #)
4th generation warfare
#shock and awe
#clear and hold
full spectrum dominance
depleted uranium
#collateral damage
smart (and– believe it– “brilliant”) weapons
MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast)
white phosphorous
#shake and bake fire mission (Fallujah)
cluster bomb
PUC (person under control): extremist/ militant/ terrorist
#“stop loss”
PTSD
black site
4. Cultural terms
haji
Taliban (“the students”)
Al Qaida (“the base” or “the database”)
Quotes:
“Modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy– the ‘independent’ judiciary, the ‘free’ press, the parliament– and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder” (3).
– Arundhati Roy
“We know how people create enemies where none exists. We know, and have plenty of pictures to illustrate it, what happens in war when the target is not quite hit. We are familiar with the words for damage and casualties which we are told to accept as inevitable. We are used to the relatively small number of its own dead that the world’s number one ruling power has to count and mourn while the mass of enemy dead, including women and children, go uncounted and are not worth mourning.
“So now we wait for the new war and the old repetitions. This time new missile systems will be even more accurate. We can be confident about the choice of pictures from this looming war. The flow of images will be sanitized of every detail of horror. Familiar TV channels will be there to give us a new installment of war as soap opera, interrupted only by ads for consumers who are living happily in peace.”
– Gunter Grass
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
–anonymous Bush administration official, possibly Karl Rove.
“I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself – and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.”
– GW Bush
“For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for – and what we continue to fight for – is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.”
– Barack Obama, Dec. 1 2009
“No one likens September 11 to August 6. Instead, the analogy we hear over and over again is to Pearl Harbor, December 7, even though the experience of a sudden, horrific attack on civilians in an urban center seems, in fact, much more like the events of September 11 than the Japanese attack on a US naval base.”
– Amy Kaplan
“The United States was not attacked because we are free. Bin Laden was not attacking the Bill of Rights. We were attacked because the United–over here because the United States’ military and political presence is massive over there.”
– Pat Buchanan
“The war is part of an alibi every imperialism has given itself, a civilizing mission carried to the extreme, as it always must be.”
—Gayatri Spivak
“Even before September 11th, the US government had a military presence in 140 countries. The United States now has military personnel deployed in 156 countries. It has between 700 to 800 military bases around the world totaling more than 250,000 personnel with around 845,000 different buildings and equipments covering land surface of 30 million acres.
“The United States has long been involved in meddling with the affairs and influencing the domestic policies of the third world nations directly and indirectly. Some of the methods used for exercising influence over the subject nations include initially providing arms and aid, training foreign military leaders, conducting covert actions through the CIA and twisting arms through organizations like the United Nations. The procedure involves providing aid to the less developed nations through IMF and World Bank, funded by the West, that leads to the eventual inability of the poor country to repay the loan. Part of the debt is forgiven the third world countries are asked to make laws favorable to the West. These poor nations are then bound to become subordinate to the loan providing nations.”
–Pakistan Daily, Aug. 21 2009
“[T]here are different types of empire and they maintain their interests in different ways. Argentina, for instance, was never a formal part of the British Empire but in the 19th century it was so dependent upon the London bond market that it was, to all intents and purposes, part of the Informal Empire.
“The end of the Cold War could have changed some of this. But rather than retreat, the US actually expanded. The world, famously, became uni-polar. In addition to its financial interests and leadership, the [Americans] maintained their network of bases around the globe. The message was clear: the US is prepared to intervene in any country on earth. Just as importantly, it maintained the capability of so intervening.”
– Alex Massie
“For years they had preyed on the Saracens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious metals, silks, ivories– the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.”
–Caspar Gutman from Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon
“Ain’t r de Emperor? De laws don’t go for him.”
–Brutus Jones from Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones
“The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the Culture Industry.”
– TW Adorno
“God has… made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America…. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.”
– Sen. Albert Beveridge
“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords… concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”
– Eugene Debs
“Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!”
– Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
“It is an illusion that imperialism will decay peacefully. Imperialism has meant constant war. Imperialists defend their control of the means of life with terrible force. There is no reason to believe they will become humane or relinquish power.”
– WUO, Prairie Fire
“War is the health of the state.”
– Randolph Bourne
“The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground.”
– delegate at the “Rebuilding Iraq 2” conference in Washington, D.C.
Two Dates:
2/15/2003: Tens of millions of people worldwide protest against the impending invasion of Iraq, an event unprecedented in human history. They do not know that CIA teams are already in Iraq, having arrived in June 2002, laying the ground for US troops. Between January and April 2003, 36 million people demonstrate.
3/18/2003: The bombing of Iraq begins.
EMPIRE
What is Empire? Is the US an Empire?
Empire is a geopolitical term, which is to say that it attempts to describe power and space. Empire is of necessity larger than a state. It is an agglomeration of different territories under a single overall rule. This rule may be indirect. It may be exercised almost exclusively in economic terms. The Empire thus ruled might be described as “informal.”
Consider all the various polities and agglomerations that constitute social life: from that atom of society, the family, to villages, towns, cities, nations, regions, transnational groupings (EU, NATO, etc.) and finally to global capitalism, a process/logic/system under which almost everyone on the planet falls.
Empire is deployed very broadly to describe an economic/cultural/diplomatic/military formation, which is to say both a political entity that can be located in time and space as well as an ideology and process.
Empire has been widely discussed in recent years, and positions on that concept range from old skool Leninist denunciations to a self-identified right wing recuperation of Empire (“Empire’s a good thing”) to some fairly sophisticated theorizing along the lines of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire. One thing all agree upon is that the concept is rooted in the exercise of power– whether, as Max Boot might argue, for the good of us all or, as a writer like Arundhati Roy clearly thinks, as a form of dominating the surplus populations of the world.
Characteristics of Empire:
large territory, composite units, formed out of previously separate units, diverse, unequal, a relationship of domination, core-periphery, local administration, usually by colonized proxies, creation of hybridized practices and identities, flow-counterflow of people, plants, germs, goods, ideas, etc.
imperialism: as a process and a set of ideas. first used with regard to Napoleon III (1860s) and later with the policies of Disraeli, et al, who self-identified as imperialists.
JA Hobson’s Imperialism identified it as the pursuit of new investment spaces, an idea developed by Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which held that monopoly capitalism and imperialism were identical. This formulation was widely influential even outside Marxist circles, and gave rise to the notion that imperialism was largely a Western phenomenon. Still, others held that imperialism simply meant the domination or control of one people over others, particularly through the mechanism of the State, which allowed for a distinction between formal and informal imperialism. If the former signified absolute physical control then the latter indicated something less direct though still powerful.
In general, most people think of the latter, informal imperialism, when they employ the term Empire: a small group of nations dominates and exploits the rest of the world via state power, TNCs, World Bank, etc. The radical view holds that Empire is more or less synonymous with US foreign policy, which shares certain features with the formal colonialism of the 19th and 20th C. Not so direct. Instead, using client regimes, as well as economic, diplomatic, and cultural forms of control. Military action however is never as they say “off the table” as witnessed in Kuwait, Iraq, Kosovo, Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan.
Rise of the term colonialism. and its variants: postcolonialism. Colony, colonist, colonial, colonialist, colonize, colonization, etc. orig. colonus (‘colony’) meant a farming settlement. later, a place to which people migrated (plantation). Settlement is the key in this early sense.
Late 19th and early 20th C: the meaning of colony shifts to include all distant areas controlled by mainly European states. The term colonialism was coined as a direct attack on European exploitation. links to white racial hegemony.
alternatives: Chas. W. Mills: “global white supremacy as a political system”
colonialism and racial schemata are usually linked.
All of this gets fairly complicated, esp. when we look to historical precedent. The Dutch colonized S. Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries and the descendants of these colonials, the Boers, in turn became the object of British imperialist aggression. Also, Palestine, a place whose inhabitants were dispossessed by the victims of European genocide. Or even the US, a nation founded by colonizers who gained their political identity via an anti-colonialist struggle with England.
Other, non-European examples: Indonesia in East Timor, Turkey in Kurdistan, Mongol Empire….
Robert Young’s work complicates the above ideas. From his Postcolonialism:
“both colonialism and imperialism involved forms of subjugation of one people by another” (15)
caravels were the key to colonization– sea-based empires no longer necessarily contiguous.
American style colonialism:
extraction of natural wealth, conversion of indigenes
“the militant Spanish drive for conversion to Christianity was an imitation of the Islamic Jihad that had been responsible for the Moors’ colonization of Spain” (16)
US: Pilgrims fled England, rather than acting on its behalf?
Empire precedes imperialism by several centuries as a category of human activity.
splitting empire into colonialism and imperialism.
the latter developed via the state for financial gain and ideological reasons, the former centered on settlement for the purpose of trade.
“colonization was pragmatic and until the 19C generally developed locally in a haphazard way”
imperalism bears scrutiny as a concept while colonialism need be thought of as a practice
Historical imperialism: Roman, Ottoman, Spanish on the one hand; late 19C Europe on the other.
Colonialism: 1) settlement 2) exploitation
French: colonization or domination. Brits: dominions or dependencies
a 3rd possible category: “maritime enclaves” (ie Guantanamo, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Guam, Diego Garcia, Malacca)
OTHERING
Robert Young gives us further insight, this time into the creation of an Other, a Native who must either be saved or destroyed.
For Fanon, “imperialism initiated a process of ‘internalization’ in which those subjected to it experienced economic, political, and social inferiority not merely in ‘external’ terms but in a manner that affected their sense of their own identity…. material inferiority creates a sense of racial and cultural inferiority…. Colonization, he argues, also took place through language: under French domination the Creole language is rendered ‘inferior’ to French, and the colonized subject is compelled to speak the tongue of his/her imperial rules, thereby experiencing their subjugation in terms of their own linguistic abilities and identity.”
But this process not only damages the colonized– it structures the colonizer himself. The colonized, as the colonizer’s Other, is intimately linked to his/her oppressor.
Other: a form of cultural projection of concepts which constructs the identities of cultural subjects through a relationship of power in which the Other is the subjugated element. In claiming knowledge about the Colonized (Muslims, barbarians, terrorists) this projection (this discourse, what Edward Said termed “Orientalism”) constructs them as its own (European) Other. Through describing purportedly ‘native’ (Muslim, ‘Oriental’, etc.) characteristics (irrational, uncivilized, etc.) Orientalism provided a definition not of the real ‘native’ identity but of the European identity in terms of the oppositions which structured its putatively innocent account. Hence, irrational Other presupposes rational Self. The construction of the Other in Orientalist discourse, then, is a matter of asserting self-identity, and the issue of the European account of the Other is thereby rendered a question of power.
Abdul Jan Mohammed characterizes the othering of the native this way: “If every desire is at base a desire to impose oneself on another and be recognized by the Other, then the colonialist situation provides an ideal context for the fulfillment of that fundamental drive. The colonizer’s military superiority enables him to impose his will, to otherize the native and thus gain recognition or acknowledgement. This is a narcissistic self-recognition because the colonizer doesn’t recognize or acknowledge the natives subjectivity independent of his relatinship tot he colonizer. The native is a recipient of the negative elements of the self that the European projects onto him.
not fulfillment but interminable dissatisfaction
constructing the native and angered that the native does not appear to be someone (a subject) other than that construct
‘the European’s alienation from his own unconscious desire…. The self becomes the prisoner of the projected image” Negated by the colonizer’s projection, the native onetheless constitutes a presence in his absence.
In addition to the hapless Native-as-victim/ Native-as-object of colonial solicitude and discipline we have the “extremist” or “militant” or “terrorist.” This is the Native gone mad. In the case of Al Qaeda, a kind of contagion from without, destroying the fiber of the host society. In the case of the Taliban, a benighted, barbaric element from within. The Islamic fundamentalist as the new menace, one who, like a zombie, is totally committed and impossible to reason with.
Notes on Ellen Meiksens Woods’s “Democracy as the Ideology of Empire”
“The association of imperialism and democracy seems to be a deeply rooted American idea, and many Americans firmly believe that this represents their country’s manifest destiny.”
At issue here is the seeming oxymoron of an empire of liberty or democracy. Jefferson actually used that phrase– ‘empire of liberty’– at one time to describe the mission of the United States.
We should perhaps emphasize the notion of mission as related to the myths of American Exceptionalism, capital P Progress, and Manifest Destiny in the context of Empire.
the “five fundamental truths” sound pretty good, though they are deeply invested in particular ideologies of the role of politics in society. The idea that “the basic subject of society is the human person”, for instance (versus a corporate person?) reflects a very Anglo-Saxon concept of the political realm as an aggregation of righs-bearing atoms.
Woods, however, is more concerned with this list of “truths” as a set of principles and their relationship to actions and realities.
“Just war”– a venerable western concept from the medieval era.
To continue: Bush admin. foreign policy seems to be transparently concerned with maintaining and even expanding global “hegemony” (in this context, rule or dominion).
Woods gestures at the strategic value of the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions. Such strategic benefits would not only include access to vital (and finite) natural resources such as oil or gas, but military advantage. Central Asia, as its name suggests, commands a view of the whole of the continent. Should there be crisis or conflict in Asia, US bases would allow a rapid US military response.
The key question: “How is it that freedom, equality, and universal human dignity can seem a convincing justification for imperialism and war?”
The quick answer, or at least its beginning: capitalism.
Woods begins by distinguishing between the status of people under capitalism, an economic system, and democracy, a political one. In capitalist democracies, every citizen is equal under the law though in terms of economic power there may be and in fact are great inequalities. Currently income inequality in the US is the highest it has ever been since records began to be kept. Globally, the situation is even more dire.
So a fundamentally hierarchical economic system can co-exist with what is ostensibly an egalitarian political structure. How so?
“[C]apitalism has created new, purely economic compulsions: the propertylessness of workers, which compels them to sell their labour power in exchange for a wage [or salary] and the compulsions of the market, which regulate the economy. Both capital and labour can have democratic rights in the political sphere without completely transforming the relation between them in a separate economic sphere; and much of human life is determined in that economic sphere, outside of the reach of democratic accountability….the idea that capitalists and workers alike are free and equal has become the most important ideological support of capitalism. Formal democracy, with its ideology of freedom, equality, and classlessness, has become one of the most effective mechanisms in sustaining and reproducing capitalist class relations.”
At issue here is a confusion or conflation of the freedoms promised by democracy and those which seemed to be implied by capitalism. After all, capitalists often speak of the “free” market as an economic ideal. Yet formal political liberties do not address us in our totality– the right to vote, speak at a rally (itself under threat of late– try keywording “free speech zone” sometime) etc. has no direct relationship to how we live or our economic well-being.
This contradiction, Woods argues, has only grown more opaque. With legal distinctions of status abolished, the facts of economic hierarchy– that there are some who have more than they could ever need or use and many who never have enough– seem to be obscured.
Such a situation is ideological in the extreme. As a general rule ideology is strongest when it is least visible. Ideology can go down to the very root of our identities as well. Criticisms of economic inequality are often met with the phrase “that ‘s just how it is”– in other words, as a fact of nature rather than a contingency of society.
“Ideologies of capitalist imperialism”
In this section Woods takes us from “the early days” to the present. Note the distinctions being established here: from a period of “outright colonial settlement” (what happened, for example, in British North America) to a phase of imperialism (Empire) which is less concerned with physical presence in space as a means of control or domination than with ensuring that capital remains free to flow in all directions. Empire, then, does not necessarily require people taking over new territories directly, though, as we shall see, Woods believes that the State as a political form and its military arm are vital to capitalism.
To return: Woods describes how theories of property undergird imperialism. Unoccupied land can be seized, a kind of theory of squatters’ rights (More). Even further, land that is occupied may be taken if its inhabitants are not making proper use of the land’s resources (Locke)– i.e., if not being exploited for profit in a market economy (for “the production of exchange value”).
Colonization thus acquired an ideological justification. It was alright to dispossess the native peoples of North America b/c they did not hold the same ideas about property that the colonists (colonizers) did.
“This was an application of capitalist principles, the principles of competition, accumulation, and profit-maximization by means of increasing productivity. It expressed a wholly new morality, in which exchange value took priority over all other goods, making possible the justification of everything from exploitation and expropriation to ecological destruction– all in the name of freedom and equality.”
As Woods notes, however, this ideological innovation soon required revision to keep pace with historical change. Eventually, colonization proved to be inefficient– insufficiently profitable. What she terms “the new imperialism… which really only emerged in the [second half of] the twentieth century” came about when direct control of native lands and populations was no longer required. It is important to emphasize Woods’ periodization of this phenomenon: she argues the new imperialism appeared post-1950, which is to say at exactly the same time that Africa and Asia were decolonizing. How do we make sense of this?
“The fully developed capitalist empire, which depends above all on economic imperatives, is basically the story of US imperialism.”
Woods evokes George Washington’s warning against “foreign entanglements” and may have the work of William Appleman Williams in mind when she refers to the US model of “a so-called informal empire, imposing market forces and manipulating them to the advantage of US capital.” Williams believed that in the 19th century the US had adopted a sort of “Imperial anti-colonialism” based on the principle that international trade should be as free as possible. The US itself, of course, made extensive use of tariffs to defend its growing economy. But other nations must be encouraged or, if need be, compelled to open their borders to trade and investment. This form of informal empire was summed up with the phrase “the open door policy” and is generally associated with US involvement in China: “the policy of the open door was designed to clear the way and establish the conditions under which America’s preponderant economic power would extend the American system throughout the world without the embarrassment and inefficiency of traditional colonialism” (Williams 50).
Back to Woods: Rather than obtain and maintain colonies, the US model was “to police the global system to make it safe for the movements of capital.”
“How does one theorize and justify a non-colonial, non-territorial empire? How does one explain and defend exploitation of people and resources that requires no direct rule or territorial expansion, and where there is no need for personal rule or the seizure of property?”
New empire’s objectives:
“free access for capital… anywhere in the world”
which requires a system of sovereign nation-states
and does not mean a wholly integrated global economy.
Profit can only be extracted under uneven or unequal conditions. For example, Adidas’ plants in littoral China, the “special economic zones” where transnational corporations can produced commodities in conditions with weak workers’ rights and low pay.
“What global capital needs is not a global state but an orderly global system of territorial states, which maintain economic and political order within territorial boundaries and at the same time permit and facilitate the penetration of those boundaries by global capital, without presenting any dangerous challenges or competition.”
Woods returns to her last question: how justified?
First, deny the existence of Empire altogether in ways that are, to an extent, analogous to the ways that class hierarchy is concealed domestically. For example: Chinese teenaged girls are probably grateful to have even low paying jobs in hazardous or uncomfortable conditions. Nobody is forcing them to make running shoes. Or better yet: an impoverished nation isn’t forced to take IMF loans. Its citizens could, after all, simply starve. There are compulsions at work in this situation. A loan from the World Bank often entails what used to be referred to as “structural adjustments.” For instance, South Africa.
“There is an analogy here between citizens in a capitalist democracy and states in a global capitalist empire. The democratic polity is made up of formally free and equal civic individuals, just as the global order is make up of formally free and equal sovereign states. And just as citizenship tends to mask class domination in capitalism, legal state sovereignty tends to mask imperial ambition.”
But there’s more: we need to justify capitalism itself. Woods offers a general outline.
Global capitalism is like nature, neutral and inevitable (“that’s just the way it is”). This strategy is based on the notion of the inscrutable yet eminently just laws of “the market” and what Woods calls “technological determinism.” It is inevitable that capitalism triumph and blanket the planet.
Yet, as Woods, points out, this sense of the inexorable spread of capitalism will not produce a single global state. Globalization requires a variegated terrain to maintain profitable investment and exchange. Thus as capital penetrates the last reaches of global economic life, the nation-state remains the only viable political form. Such a geopolitical landscape, however, can lapse into crisis and “that requires political, military, and ideological supports that are not supplied by purely economic power.”
Thus the mission of the US and other nation-states is radically open-ended: to keep the world safe for capital. Because of this, the military apparatus is even more gargantuan than ever. “To put it bluntly, it needs an ideology to justify what amounts to a state of permanent war.”
Interference in other nations’ affairs for the benefit of capitalism must be concealed under the aegis of democracy. “The concept of democracy covers a multitude of sins, and it has become especially useful now that the old postwar imperial strategies no longer work.”
“as the long postwar boom in the advanced capitalist countries gave way to a long economic downturn, the development strategy gave way to neoliberalism, with its policies of ‘structural adjustment,’ privatization, and the complete vulnerability of subordinate economies to foreign capital and financial speculation.”
“talk of democracy is cheap and makes a useful rhetorical substitute, at least for home consumption in imperial capitals.”
the contradictions of democratic rhetoric/imperial practice:
practical support for oppressive regimes: Saudi Arabia, Colombia, etc.
working “the dark side”: Gitmo, black sites, extraordinary rendition, torture, etc.
domestic spying, preventive detention, conspiracy prosecutions
Set these abuses aside for the moment and focus on how the Bush regime justifies its policies. First, consider that the ideal of democracy espoused today is a pale shadow of what it once might have meant. Woods argues this is a peculiarly American conception of democracy, one that goes all the way back to the 18th century:
“its main purpose… was not to strengthen democratic citizenship but, on the contrary, to preserve elite rule in the face of an unavoidable mass politics and popular sovereignty. The object was to depoliticize the citizenry and turn democracy into rule by propertied classes over a passive citizen body, and also to confine democracy to a limited, formal political sphere…. the did everything possible to make democratic citizenship compatible with… a hierarchy of economic interests.”
The “checks and balances” of the American political system were intended and indeed do function as a means of foreclosing the possibility of dramatic, radical socio-economic change.
“So here was a democracy whose essential purpose was to leave class domination intact, while maintaining democratic suffrage and other democratic forms.”
“Today, the USA represents the model capitalist democracy. It combines, in ideological conception and in practical reality, the formal sovereignty of the people with the substantive rule of capital.”
BUT “capitalism relies on the state to create the conditions of accumulation and enforcement that capital cannot create for itself.” In other words there is a division of labor between the state and economy, yet the economy depends in a meaningful way on the state for its conditions of success.
“The US idea of democracy, for all its undoubted benefits, especially in the constitutional protection of civil liberties… is designed to make politics subordinate to class inequality and differences of economic interest.”
“How the US Conception of Democracy Operates in Support of Imperialism”
“The essence of democracy as conceived in the USA is the coupling of formal democracy with substantive class rule, the class rule of capital. This involves a delicate conceptual balancing act between an assertion of popular sovereignty– government of, by, and for the people– and the dominance of capital, the subordination of politics to capitalist markets, and the imperatives of profit. Those of us who grew up in the United States are well primed to accept this tricky combination. We are well prepared to view class power as having nothing to do with either power or class. We are educated to see property as the most fundamental human right and the market as the true realm of freedom. We are taught to view the state as just a necessary evil to sustain the right of property and the free market. We are taught to accept that most social conditions are determined in an economic sphere outside the read of democracy. We learn to think of ‘the people’ not in social terms, as the common people, the working class, or anything to do with popular power, but as a purely political category; and we confine democracy to a limited, formal political sphere. As the founding fathers intended, we think of political rights as essentially passive, and citizenship as a passive, individual, even private identity, which may express itself by voting from time to time but which has no active, collective, or social meaning.”
The above is the necessary ideological grounding for the justification of imperial democracy. Woods then moves on to China and the Open Door:
“This doctrine began by asserting the territorial integrity of China, in other words its right to be free of foreign domination (!).
Again, the analogy between the citizen’s formal political freedoms and the nation’s sovereignty: nations have rights yet should be subject to a global capitalist order. The self-interest of each nation will produce an overall good for the world. In other words, China is free to do as she pleases so long as she does not seek to interfere with “economic imperatives.”
How does the US promote its own power imperially even as it appeals to “democracy”?
“two essential strategies”: limit the electoral process, evacuate the social content of democracy.
“the desocialization of democracy is the really crucial anti-democratic strategy, more important in the end than any electoral devices. The whole point of this strategy is to put formal political rights in place of any social rights, and to put as much of social life as possible out of reach of democratic accountability.”
Iraq, the Bremmer programs of privatization, direct investment. Cf. Shock Doctrine.
“The conceptual balancing act in the ideology of empire and democracy has depended on a particular division of labour between political and economic spheres…. But the old relation between political and economic power… is being disrupted…. The consequence of a globalized economy has been that states have become more, not less, involved in managing economic circuits through the medium of inter-state relations, and capital has become more, not less, dependent on organization of the economy by a system of many local states. This means that the division of labour between the economic and political is less clear-cut than it was.”
In other words, an opening: “local and national struggles are more important now than ever.”
Further Reading:
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
Johnson, Chalmers. The Sorrows of Empire.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine.
Lenin, VI. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Roy, Arundhati. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.
Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.
Woods, Ellen Meiskens. Empire of Capital.
Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism.
The New Deal: Extra extra credit
Today we discussed extra credit. Here’s the revised version:
1. If you make less than a B on one of your midterms you can bump your grade up a notch upon completion of 3 extra credit assignments.
2. You can enhance your seminar grade by the same measure if you complete 3 extra credit assignments.
There are two sorts of extra credit assignments:
1. The Civic Engagement Project. Go to a political event and write it up. 350-500 words. Examples of political events include a city council meeting, student goverment, a rally or demonstration, a political club or other organization (College Republicans, SQE, Socialist Workers’ Party– it doesn’t matter what the political content of the group is).
2. American Culture and History in Film. Write a smart, thoughtful film review (again, 350-500 words) on one of the following films, linking it to issues of American history and culture raised in this course:
Incident at Oglala
documentary about Pine Ridge Reservation, the shooting of 2 FBI agents, and the prosecution of Leonard Peltier.
Bamboozled
Spike Lee’s acerbic satire on African Americans and the media.
Full Metal Jacket
Stanley Kubrick’s blistering and humorous film about marines in Vietnam.
Why We Fight (2005)
Fairly recent doc on US militarism.
The Power of Nightmares
Adam Curtis’s doc. on the rise of neoconservatism and political Islam.
Thousand Pieces of Gold
Historical romance about a young Chinese woman’s experience in the frontier west.
Forbidden City, USA
doc. about a nightclub in SF featuring an all-AsianAmerican cast of performers. Circa 1940s.
4 Little Girls
More Spike. This one’s about a church bombing during the Civil Rights Era.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Pod people attack the USA! You can almost smell the anti-communist paranoia.
Norma Rae
A working-class heroine struggles to unionize the workers at her mill.
Weather Underground
This was assigned for class, right?
Banished
Amazing doc. about the racial cleansing of African Americans from their homes.
Matewan
John Sayles, one of the most interesting US film-makers alive, directs this story of striking miners in W. Virginia.
No Logo
A short doc. on consumerism featuring Naomi Klein.
Scratch (2001)
Q-bert! Beastie Boys! Turntablism!
American Dream
Barbara Kopple’s doc. on American labor strife.
Ethnic Notions
Marlon Riggs’s creative doc. on representations of black people. It’s virtually one long montage.
Strange Fruit
About the song and the man who wrote it and the woman who sang it.
Where Do You Stand?
More labor.
Deep Blues
Robert Palmer (RIP) interviews some down-home, collard greens-and-hominy blues artists.
George Washington (2000)
A compelling film about young kids in the US south.
Mai’s America
Great doc. about a young Vietnamese woman who comes to the US to go to school.
Wobblies
Solidarity forever.
Dig!
Award-winning doc. on two bands: the Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Crazy.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
doc. on the implosion of Enron.
There Will Be Blood
Based on an Upton Sinclair novel titled Oil, this film contains the memorable declaration “I drink your milkshake!”
Mystery Train
Jim Jarmusch’s love letter to Memphis, Tennessee and rock-n-roll.
Boulevard Nights
Late-70s coming of age flick about life in el barrio.
They Live
I showed you a clip for the the Adorno lecture.
Double Indemnity
We watched this already.
The Cradle Will Rock
An homage to the cultural ferment of the Great Depression.
North Country
Charlize Theron uglies up a touch to play a blue collar woman forced to confront entrenched misogyny in the workplace.
Lone Star
Another Sayles flick. This one’s a murder mystery and the Tex-Mex border.
All Over Me
Groovy coming of age film. Sexual identity, city life, punk rock.
Chan is Missing
one of the first US films that treats Asian American characters like real people rather than dragon ladies or coolies. Wayne Wang directs.
Glengarry GlenRoss
David Mamet, who is a great writer with questionable politics, wrote the screen play. “1st prize is a cadillac. 2nd prize is a set of steak knives. 3rd prize is you’re fired.”
Salt of the Earth
Black-listed for its lefty ideology. Miners on strike in New Mexico.
Manderlay
Lars Von Trier is a troubled, beautiful film-maker. When Roger Ebert saw this film he declared it “anti-American.”
The Eyes of Tammy Faye
doc. about a dotty, tenacious televangelist who watches her multi-million dollar tv empire collapse amid charges of salaciousness and excess.
Home Movie
doc. about people’s houses. one guy lives in a missile silo. pretty neat.
JUST ADDED:
Red Dawn
Nicaraguan paratroopers drop into the cornfields of Iowa! The commies are coming!
American Gangster
Denzel Washington as the title character. Enough said.
Hearts and Minds
Oscar winning doc. about the American War in Vietnam.
Ride with the Devil
My favorite Civil War film. Based on real people and events. Tobey Maguire looks like he’s about 12.
US Interventions
A history of US interventions from 1890-present.
A timeline of US interventions, 1801-2004.
Another timeline, from globalsecurity.org:
| 1798-1800 | France | Undeclared naval war against France, marines land in Puerto Plata. |
| 1801-1805 | Tripoli | War with Tripoli (Libya), called “First Barbary War”. |
| 1806 | Spanish Mexico | Military force enters Spanish territory in headwaters of the Rio Grande. |
| 1806-1810 | Spanish and French in Caribbean | US naval vessels attack French and Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. |
| 1810 | Spanish West Florida | Troops invade and seize Western Florida, a Spanish possession. |
| 1812 | Spanish East Florida | Troops seize Amelia Island and adjacent territories. |
| 1812 | Britain | War of 1812, includes naval and land operations. |
| 1813 | Marquesas Island | Forces seize Nukahiva and establish first US naval base in the Pacific. |
| 1814 | Spanish (East Florida) | Troops seize Pensacola in Spanish East Florida. |
| 1814-1825 | French, British and Spanish in Caribbean | US naval squadron engages French, British and Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. |
| 1815 | Algiers and Tripoli | US naval fleet under Captain Stephen Decatur wages “Second Barbary War” in North Africa. |
| 1816-1819 | Spanish East Florida | Troops attack and seize Nicholls’ Fort, Amelia Island and other strategic locations. Spain eventually cedes East Florida to the US. |
| 1822-1825 | Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico | Marines land in numerous cities in the Spanish island of Cuba and also in Spanish Puerto Rico. |
| 1827 | Greece | Marines invade the Greek islands of Argentiere, Miconi and Andross. |
| 1831 | Falkland/Malvinas Islands | US naval squadrons aggress the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. |
| 1832 | Sumatra, Dutch East Indies | US naval squadrons attack Qallah Battoo. |
| 1833 | Argentina | Forces land in Buenos Aires and engage local combatants. |
| 1835-1836 | Peru | Troops dispatched twice for counter-insurgency operations. |
| 1836 | Mexico | Troops assist Texas war for independence. |
| 1837 | Canada | Naval incident on the Canadian border leads to mobilization of a large force to invade Canada. War is narrowly averted. |
| 1838 | Sumatra, Dutch East Indies | US naval forces sent to Sumatra for punitive expedition. |
| 1840-1841 | Fiji | Naval forces deployed, marines land. |
| 1841 | Samoa | Naval forces deployed, marines land. |
| 1842 | Mexico | Naval forces temporarily seize cities of Monterey and San Diego. |
| 1843 | China | Marines land in Canton. |
| 1843 | Ivory Coast | Marines land. |
| 1846-1848 | Mexico | Full-scale war. Mexico cedes half of its territory to the US by the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. |
| 1849 | Ottoman Empire (Turkey) | Naval force dispatched to Smyrna. |
| 1852-1853 | Argentina | Marines land in Buenos Aires. |
| 1854 | Nicaragua | Navy bombards and largely destroys city of San Juan del Norte. Marines land and set fire to the city. |
| 1854 | Japan | Commodore Perry and his fleet deploy at Yokohama. |
| 1855 | Uruguay | Marines land in Montevideo. |
| 1856 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Marines land for counter-insurgency campaign. |
| 1856 | China | Marines deployed in Canton. |
| 1856 | Hawaii | Naval forces seize small islands of Jarvis, Baker and Howland in the Hawaiian Islands. |
| 1857 | Nicaragua | Marines land. |
| 1858 | Uruguay | Marines land in Montevideo. |
| 1858 | Fiji | Marines land. |
| 1859 | Paraguay | Large naval force deployed. |
| 1859 | China | Troops enter Shanghai. |
| 1859 | Mexico | Military force enters northern area. |
| 1860 | Portuguese West Africa | Troops land at Kissembo. |
| 1860 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Troops and naval forces deployed. |
| 1863 | Japan | Troops land at Shimonoseki. |
| 1864 | Japan | Troops landed in Yedo. |
| 1865 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Marines landed. |
| 1866 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Troops invade and seize Matamoros, later withdraw. |
| 1866 | China | Marines land in Newchwang. |
| 1867 | Nicaragua | Marines land in Managua and Leon in Nicaragua. |
| 1867 | Formosa Island (Taiwan) | Marines land. |
| 1867 | Midway Island | Naval forces seize this island in the Hawaiian Archipelago for a naval base. |
| 1868 | Japan | Naval forces deployed at Osaka, Hiogo, Nagasaki, Yokohama and Negata. |
| 1868 | Uruguay | Marines land at Montevideo. |
| 1870 | Colombia | Marines landed. |
| 1871 | Korea | Forces landed. |
| 1873 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Marines landed. |
| 1874 | Hawaii | Sailors and marines landed. |
| 1876 | Mexico | Army again occupies Matamoros. |
| 1882 | British Egypt | Troops land. |
| 1885 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Troops land in Colon and Panama City. |
| 1885 | Samoa | Naval force deployed. |
| 1887 | Hawaii | Navy gains right to build permanent naval base at Pearl Harbor. |
| 1888 | Haiti | Troops landed. |
| 1888 | Samoa | Marines landed. |
| 1889 | Samoa | Clash with German naval forces. |
| 1890 | Argentina | US sailors land in Buenos Aires. |
| 1891 | Chile | US sailors land in the major port city of Valparaiso. |
| 1891 | Haiti | Marines land on US-claimed Navassa Island. |
| 1893 | Hawaii | Marines and other naval forces land and overthrow the monarchy. Read More | President Cleveland’s Message |
| 1894 | Nicaragua | Marines land at Bluefields on the eastern coast. |
| 1894-1895 | China | Marines are stationed at Tientsin and Beijing. A naval ship takes up position at Newchwang. |
| 1894-1896 | Korea | Marines land and remain in Seoul. |
| 1895 | Colombia | Marines are sent to the town Bocas del Toro. |
| 1896 | Nicaragua | Marines land in the port of Corinto. |
| 1898 | Nicaragua | Marines land at the port city of San Juan del Sur. |
| 1898 | Guam | Naval forces seize Guam Island from Spain and the US holds the island permanently. |
| 1898 | Cuba | Naval and land forces seize Cuba from Spain. |
| 1898 | Puerto Rico | Naval and land forces seize Puerto Rico from Spain and the US holds the island permanently. |
| 1898 | Philippines | Naval forces defeat the Spanish fleet and the US takes control of the country. |
| 1899 | Philippines | Military units are reinforced for extensive counter-insurgency operations. |
| 1899 | Samoa | Naval forces land |
| 1899 | Nicaragua | Marines land at the port city of Bluefields. |
| 1900 | China | US forces intervene in several cities. |
| 1901 | Colombia/Panama | Marines land. |
| 1902 | Colombia/Panama | US forces land in Bocas de Toro |
| 1903 | Colombia/Panama | With US backing, a group in northern Colombia declares independence as the state of Panama |
| 1903 | Guam | Navy begins development in Apra Harbor of a permanent base installation. |
| 1903 | Honduras | Marines go ashore at Puerto Cortez. |
| 1903 | Dominican Republic | Marines land in Santo Domingo. |
| 1904-1905 | Korea | Marines land and stay in Seoul. |
| 1906-1909 | Cuba | Marines land. The US builds a major naval base at Guantanamo Bay. |
| 1907 | Nicaragua | Troops seize major centers. |
| 1907 | Honduras | Marines land and take up garrison in cities of Trujillo, Ceiba, Puerto Cortez, San Pedro, Laguna and Choloma. |
| 1908 | Panama | Marines land and carry out operations. |
| 1910 | Nicaragua | Marines land in Bluefields and Corinto. |
| 1911 | Honduras | Marines intervene. |
| 1911-1941 | China | The US builds up its military presence in the country to a force of 5000 troops and a fleet of 44 vessels patrolling China’s coast and rivers. |
| 1912 | Cuba | US sends army troops into combat in Havana. |
| 1912 | Panama | Army troops intervene. |
| 1912 | Honduras | Marines land. |
| 1912-1933 | Nicaragua | Marines intervene. A 20-year occupation of the country follows. |
| 1913 | Mexico | Marines land at Ciaris Estero. |
| 1914 | Dominican Republic | Naval forces engage in battles in the city of Santo Domingo. |
| 1914 | Mexico | US forces seize and occupy Mexico’s major port city of Veracrus from April through November. |
| 1915-1916 | Mexico | An expeditionary force of the US Army under Gen. John J. Pershing crosses the Texas border and penetrates several hundred miles into Mexican territory. Eventually reinforced to over 11,000 officers and men. |
| 1914-1934 | Haiti | Troops land, aerial bombardment leading to a 19-year military occupation. |
| 1916-1924 | Dominican Republic | Military intervention leading to 8-year occupation. |
| 1917-1933 | Cuba | Landing of naval forces. Beginning of a 15-year occupation. |
| 1918-1920 | Panama | Troops intervene, remain on “police duty” for over 2 years. |
| 1918-1922 | Russia | Naval forces and army troops fight battles in several areas of the country during a five- year period. |
| 1919 | Yugoslavia | Marines intervene in Dalmatia. |
| 1919 | Honduras | Marines land. |
| 1920 | Guatemala | Troops intervene. |
| 1922 | Turkey | Marines engaged in operations in Smyrna (Izmir). |
| 1922-1927 | China | Naval forces and troops deployed during 5-year period. |
| 1924-1925 | Honduras | Troops land twice in two-year period. |
| 1925 | Panama | Marines land and engage in operations. |
| 1927-1934 | China | Marines and naval forces stationed throughout the country. |
| 1932 | El Salvador | Naval forces intervene. |
| 1933 | Cuba | Naval forces deployed. |
| 1934 | China | Marines land in Foochow. |
| 1946 | Iran | Troops deployed in northern province. |
| 1946-1949 | China | Major US army presence of about 100,000 troops, fighting, training and advising local combatants. |
| 1947-1949 | Greece | US forces wage a 3-year counterinsurgency campaign. |
| 1948 | Italy | Heavy CIA involvement in national elections. |
| 1948-1954 | Philippines | Commando operations, “secret” CIA war. |
| 1950-1953 | Korea | Major forces engaged in war in Korean peninsula. |
| 1953 | Iran | CIA overthrows government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Read More |
| 1954 | Vietnam | Financial and materiel support for colonial French military operations, leads eventually to direct US military involvement. |
| 1954 | Guatemala | CIA overthrows the government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. |
| 1958 | Lebanon | US marines and army units totaling 14,000 land. |
| 1958 | Panama | Clashes between US forces in Canal Zone and local citizens. |
| 1959 | Haiti | Marines land. |
| 1960 | Congo | CIA-backed overthrow and assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. |
| 1960-1964 | Vietnam | Gradual introduction of military advisors and special forces. |
| 1961 | Cuba | CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. |
| 1962 | Cuba | Nuclear threat and naval blockade. |
| 1962 | Laos | CIA-backed military coup. |
| 1963 | Ecuador | CIA backs military overthrow of President Jose Maria Valesco Ibarra. |
| 1964 | Panama | Clashes between US forces in Canal Zone and local citizens. |
| 1964 | Brazil | CIA-backed military coup overthrows the government of Joao Goulart and Gen. Castello Branco takes power. Read More |
| 1965-1975 | Vietnam | Large commitment of military forces, including air, naval and ground units numbering up to 500,000+ troops. Full-scale war, lasting for ten years. |
| 1965 | Indonesia | CIA-backed army coup overthrows President Sukarno and brings Gen. Suharto to power. |
| 1965 | Congo | CIA backed military coup overthrows President Joseph Kasavubu and brings Joseph Mobutu to power. |
| 1965 | Dominican Republic | 23,000 troops land. |
| 1965-1973 | Laos | Bombing campaign begin, lasting eight years. |
| 1966 | Ghana | CIA-backed military coup ousts President Kwame Nkrumah. |
| 1966-1967 | Guatemala | Extensive counter-insurgency operation. |
| 1969-1975 | Cambodia | CIA supports military coup against Prince Sihanouk, bringing Lon Nol to power. Intensive bombing for seven years along border with Vietnam. |
| 1970 | Oman | Counter-insurgency operation, including coordination with Iranian marine invasion. |
| 1971-1973 | Laos | Invasion by US and South Vietnames forces. |
| 1973 | Chile | CIA-backed military coup ousts government of President Salvador Allende. Gen. Augusto Pinochet comes to power. |
| 1975 | Cambodia | Marines land, engage in combat with government forces. |
| 1976-1992 | Angola | Military and CIA operations. |
| 1980 | Iran | Special operations units land in Iranian desert. Helicopter malfunction leads to aborting of planned raid. |
| 1981 | Libya | Naval jets shoot down two Libyan jets in maneuvers over the Mediterranean. |
| 1981-1992 | El Salvador | CIA and special forces begin a long counterinsurgency campaign. |
| 1981-1990 | Nicaragua | CIA directs exile “Contra” operations. US air units drop sea mines in harbors. |
| 1982-1984 | Lebanon | Marines land and naval forces fire on local combatants. |
| 1983 | Grenada | Military forces invade Grenada. |
| 1983-1989 | Honduras | Large program of military assistance aimed at conflict in Nicaragua. |
| 1984 | Iran | Two Iranian jets shot down over the Persian Gulf. |
| 1986 | Libya | US aircraft bomb the cities of Tripoli and Benghazi, including direct strikes at the official residence of President Muamar al Qadaffi. |
| 1986 | Bolivia | Special Forces units engage in counter-insurgency. |
| 1987-1988 | Iran | Naval forces block Iranian shipping. Civilian airliner shot down by missile cruiser. |
| 1989 | Libya | Naval aircraft shoot down two Libyan jets over Gulf of Sidra. |
| 1989 | Philippines | CIA and Special Forces involved in counterinsurgency. |
| 1989-1990 | Panama | 27,000 troops as well as naval and air power used to overthrow government of President Noriega. |
| 1990 | Liberia | Troops deployed. |
| 1990-1991 | Iraq | Major military operation, including naval blockade, air strikes; large number of troops attack Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait. |
| 1991-2003 | Iraq | Control of Iraqi airspace in north and south of the country with periodic attacks on air and ground targets. |
| 1991 | Haiti | CIA-backed military coup ousts President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. |
| 1992-1994 | Somalia | Special operations forces intervene. |
| 1992-1994 | Yugoslavia | Major role in NATO blockade of Serbia and Montenegro. |
| 1993-1995 | Bosnia | Active military involvement with air and ground forces. |
| 1994-1996 | Haiti | Troops depose military rulers and restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office. |
| 1995 | Croatia | Krajina Serb airfields attacked. |
| 1996-1997 | Zaire (Congo) | Marines involved in operations in eastern region of the country. |
| 1997 | Liberia | Troops deployed. |
| 1998 | Sudan | Air strikes destroy country’s major pharmaceutical plant. |
| 1998 | Afghanistan | Attack on targets in the country. |
| 1998 | Iraq | Four days of intensive air and missile strikes. |
| 1999 | Yugoslavia | Major involvement in NATO air strikes. |
| 2001 | Macedonia | NATO troops shift and partially disarm Albanian rebels. |
| 2001 | Afghanistan | Air attacks and ground operations oust Taliban government and install a new regime. |
| 2003 | Iraq | Invasion with large ground, air and naval forces ousts government of Saddam Hussein and establishes new government. |
| 2003-present | Iraq | Occupation force of 150,000 troops in protracted counter-insurgency war |
| 2004 | Haiti | Marines land. CIA-backed forces overthrow President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. |
AMS 179: American Popular Culture
Looks like I’ve got a job at SJSU in the Spring after all. This one’s a pop culture class. Not quite as comprehensive as AMS1b, but we’ll do some pretty cool stuff: blackface minstrelsy, zombies, the Beats, cyberpunk, hip hop and graphlit. Here’s the preliminary syllabus:
American Popular Culture
Spring 2010
Tue/Thu
Room # HUM
Instructor: Sean Connelly
Office Hours: TBA
Course Blog: analepsis.wordpress.com.
The Proposition:
AMS 179 covers roughly 150 years of American popular culture, from its curious origins in the minstrel show to postwar popular fiction, zombies, the Cold War soundtrack of Be-bop, the Beats’ cultural dissensus, cyberpunk, the rise of Hip Hop and recent graphic literature.
Work:
Final Paper (min. 6 pages)
A Midterm
8 Reading Responses (min. 350 words each)
Texts:
Jessica Abel, La Perdida (graphic novel)
Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars
William Shakespeare, Othello
Nathaniel West. Day of the Locust
Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (graphic novel)
Reader
Units:
Racial Masquerade and the Roots of American Pop Culture
William Shakespeare, Othello
reader: Saxton, White Republic; Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Anonymous, Otello; O’Neill, The Emperor Jones
tracks: “Old Folks at Home”; from Porgy & Bess; Robeson’s “Old Man River”
clips: The Jazz Singer, The Emperor Jones, Bamboozled
Zombies, Living and (Un)Dead
Matheson, I Am Legend
Nathaniel West, Day of the Locust
reader: Seabrook, Magic Island; Hurston, Tell My Horse; Pulliam, Zombie; Adorno, The Culture Industry
tracks: The Cranberries, Zombie; Bauhaus, Bela Lugosi’s Dead; Screaming Jay Hawkins,
clips: Invasion of the Body Snatchers; White Zombie; I Walked with a Zombie; Night of the Living Dead; Zombieland; Serpent Under the Rainbow, The Hunger.
Cold War Beats: The Sound of Subculture
Kerouac, The Subterraneans
reader: Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”; Kaufman, poems; Di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik; Baraka, poems; Mailer, The White Negro
tracks: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday
clips: The Beat Generation; High School Confidential; Pull My Daisy
Hip Hop Wars
Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars
reader: Kelefa Sanneh, “The Rap Against Rockism”; others
tracks: various
clips: Wild Style; Scratch; Dead Presidents.
Virtual Pop
William Gibson, Neuromancer
reader: Jean Baudrillard, “Simulation and Simulacrum”
tracks: various
clips: The Matrix, eXistenZ, Virtuality.
American Ink
Jessica Abel, La Perdida
Gene Yang, American Born Chinese
reader:
tracks: various
clips: Ghost World; A Scanner Darkly, Waltz with Bashir; Forbidden City, USA; The Bronze Screen
Grading Rubric:
Reading Responses: 25%
Midterm: 25%
Final paper: 25%
Class work (participation, pop quizzes, in-class writing, attendance): 25%
Viggo Does Empire
A short film based on Howard Zinn’s work and life narrated by Viggo Mortensen. It may help prepare you for lecture on Wednesday.
The War
On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 11:15 PM, <connelly@sfsu.edu> wrote:
Hi Dad,
here are my questions. if you think they’re not the right ones feel free to pose your own. thanks for your help.
s
You were not drafted into the military but joined the Navy in 1965 (? after the 1st Marine Division landed in Danang?). What motivated you to do so? Did those motives dovetail with the official explanations for US involvement in Southeast Asia?
I was sworn into the Navy, 09 FEB 68, in Jacksonville, FL. I joined the Navy for one tour only. I wanted to go to Viet Nam because I felt my ecclesiastical deferral wasn’t just. At night, I’d watch young men dying in Viet Nam and it seemed so unreal, but I knew that it was real. I felt others were going in my place and that I needed to do what I could to support them. I wanted to do my part and come home.
I experienced the typical xenophobic paranoia that most people my age felt toward the ‘communists.’ My images of Viet Nam were based on the media and though I knew of the United States foolish decision not to support Ho Chi Min during the early 1940s, I passed it off as just another ‘Ugly American’ episode. My motives were vague. War was part of the human condition. The domino theory made sense to me. I understood the war in Viet Nam to be principally an issue over natural resources and that we were attempting to deny the Chinese communists access to needed resources.
What is your strongest single memory of being in Vietnam? Can you think of an experience that might act as a kind of summation of the time you spent there?
I was working medevac on the USS Okinawa (LPH-3). A group of Marines and a Corpsman had been brought aboard following a firefight. Several of the Marines and the Corpsman were going through triage on the hanger deck. The Combat Cargo Officer came to the hanger deck where I was working in triage and asked me to come out onto one of the flight elevators. I followed him out to the elevator to where a dead Marine lay. Just him, the CCO and me: I knelt and lifted the Marine up into a hug; blest and kissed his bloody forehead. I cried, thinking how his mom would soon be told about her dead son. And I thought about the time between my holding him in my arms and when she’d receive official notification of his death. And I hurt for her. I hurt so badly for her.
Did your experience in Vietnam change you? Did the war change the United States?
Yeah. No one really came home, at least I didn’t. The experience altered me. I’m no exception, nor is Viet Nam. Being around trauma, being afraid of pain and maybe death doesn’t have to happen in combat in order to cause persons to change. You can change due to an event on the interstate highway system, like a smash up. But being in the areas of combat and fear for substantial periods of time produced changes in my thinking and in my attitude. I think what caused me the most ache is my loss of innocence. I failed to be analytical enough. I didn’t see the falsehoods, the preconceptions (including my own) that prompted our government to engage in such folly. I tend to be doubtful about almost anything I’m told. Truth seems to have a mushy quality to it. As the years have passed I’ve come to believe that life is filled with suffering and that my only reason for being is to help lessen that suffering as best I am able. Along the way there is beauty and kindness in which to delight.
Viet Nam has not changed the United States, appreciably. War is part of human activity. I’m not sure we can ever rid ourselves of war, we merely find differing ways of conducting it. The present wars being conducted by the United States Government are similar in nature to the ones of the past, including Viet Nam. I would like to see the wars lessened, but and I think that can only come about by the ‘aggressiveness’ shown by people such as Mohandas Gandhi. Surgical strikes still result in surgical procedures.
Above: Bert Connelly has crossed the equator.
Sing A Battle Song Notes
Notes on Weather Underground Reading.
From Sing a Battle Song.
“You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”
opening quote by Lin Piao: primary contradiction of the present is the struggle between “revolutionary peoples” of the 3rd World and “the imperialists headed by the United States”
is this still the case?
Weather picks up Lin Piao’s idea and employs it as a litmus test for political action and analysis: “we determine who are our friends and who are our enemies according to whether they help US imperialism or fight to defeat it.” Again, can this principle be applied today?
A new revolutionary sugject. Rather than the industrial proletariat, a decolonizing, 3rd World proletariat– i.e., “the native”: “It is the oppressed peoples of the world who have created the wealth of this empire and it is to them that it belongs”
Relative position of US underclass/ working-class: “even the crumbs doled out to the enslaved masses within its borders provide for material existence very much above the conditions of the masses of people of the world”
“your television set, car and wardrobe already belong… to the people of the rest of the world”: You are a receiver of stolen goods.
the necessity of an internationalist framework: “any conception of ‘socialist revolution’ simply in terms of the working people of the US… is a conception of a fight for a particular privileged interest, and is a very dangerous ideology”
Goals: “the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism”
How it will happen: “the military forces of the US overextending themselves… and being defeated piecemeal; struggle within the US will be a vital part of this process”
“A Declaration of a State of War”
the “strategic position” of “Amerika’s youth”– youth itself is a political/revolutionary subject
failed tactics and new ones: “protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.” Note that the call here is not just for any form of violence but specifically “revolutionary violence.” Different forms of violence with different spatio-temporal dimensions: the slow violence of starvation or disease in the 3W; the trans-national violence of the market, structural adjustments, privatization, etc; state violence vs. popular violence; political violence vs. criminal violence.
3W models for revolution: Tupamaros, Che’s fish in the sea: “The alienation and contempt that young people have for this country has created the ocean for this revolution.” i.e., Youth culture, young people, will be the sea.
State violence: Cambodia, killing students in Jackson, at Kent State, etc.
“the war and racism of this society show that it is too fucked up. We will never live peaceably under this system.”
bragging rights: Weather has not been caught. They are “invisible.” Proving that direct resistance is possible and undermining the myth of the invulnerability and omnipotence of the State.
“We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons.” Drugs as a component of cultural revolution, which has a political valence. “Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.”
“Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks”: establishing an identification of cultural dissent and political revolt.
More braggadocio: “we are…. in every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmjouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope and loading guns:
“we will never go back”: no turning around.
Further models of revolution, this time from the US “3W”– African America as an internal colony of white supremacists US capitalism.
Communique: “Headquarters:
Avenging crimes against political dissidents: “They have murdered Fred Hampton and tortured Joan Bird.”
Note the “weapons” listed at the end of the communique: “Political power grows out of a gun [this is an approximate quote from Mao Zedong] a molotov [cocktail] a riot, a commune… and from the soul of the people.”
What IS the soul of the people?
“Honk Amerika”
as in “honky.” on the anniversary of the Cuban revolution. links to prison activism and prison-industrial complex. George Jackson, radical intellectual and prisoner, killed. H. Rap Brown gone into hiding. White Panthers under attack.
“Everywhere we see the growth of revolutionary culture and the ways which every move of the monster state tightens the noose around its own neck.”
In other words, state repression is a form of self-destruction for the state. There is a sense of inevitability here, Marxist-Hegelian in origin.
“The Bombing of the Pentagon”
Bombing on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday (died in 1968). Extensive quotes from “Uncle Ho” including poetry. Note 2nd Ho quote: Buddhist imagery of peaks, clouds, mirror, etc.
Mining of harbors of N. VN: a war crime.
A thumbnail history of US aggression in SE Asia. Quotes Ike: “‘had elections been held possibly 80% of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh’”– in other words the issue isn’t democracy but anti-communism. Also, the Pentagon Papers: “‘S. VN was essentially the creation of the US’”.
According to Weather 3 million already dead (in 1972). SRVN puts the official toll at 5 million. These are genocidal numbers.
Criticism of Vietnamization: lower US troop levels, increase technological means for violence– airpower, ships, etc. This is the same principle at work in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
Fundamental racism of US empire: “it is worth the cost b/c the bodies aren’t white”.
Calls for total withdrawal and VN self-determination. Again, mining of harbors. Also, “contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons”. Nixon a war criminal. This is intended as an objective, legal statement rather than mere rhetoric. Cf. Geneva Conventions.
Become familiar with those who have been designated your enemy. “These are the people we are taught to hate…. Try to understand how they persevere.” How many of us can name the languages spoken in Afghanistan, know much of anything at all about its history. Who even knows the difference between Sunni/Shia?
Final quote from Ho: “You are only a little milestone,/ Which stands at the edge of the highway./ To people passing by/ You point the right direction”
A kind of revolutionary humility. Also: is this the way we ought to view the figures of the past, those who formed part of a radical tradition– F. Douglass, John Brown, Thomas Paine, Emma Goldman, et al?
Prairie Fire
Note the dedication: a connection to a radical US tradition. Why these particular figures?
Opening address: “sisters and bros.”– inverting the standard male-first form, addressing readers as part of an extended family.
“A cycle is done.”– i.e., there will be many more.
Turning point: the American War in VN is over. This changes the situation dramatically. Where to go from here?
Note the language at the bottom of p. 233: indicates a shift in priorities. “dialectic,” “concrete analysis,” “strategy.”
“correct ideology”– we are all ideological. no escape from ideas, but must develop the right ones.
“seize power”– take the state (NOT anarchist)
Who is PF for? “communist-minded people, independent organizers and anti-imperialists; those who carry the traditions and lessons… those who join the in the struggles of today…. all sisters and brothers… engaged in armed struggle…. prisoners, women’s groups, collectives, study groups, workers’ organizing committees, communes, GI organizers, consciousness-raising groups, veterans, community groups and revolutionaries of all kinds; to all who will read, criticize and bring its content to life in practice.” A broadly construed– not necessarily communist or Marxist– Revolutionary Left.
The creation of “a way of life” in which “the only certainty will be constant change” and “the only possibilities are victory or death” [another invocation of Che].
from PF: “Arm the Spirit”
What does it mean to “arm the spirit”? An odd turn of phrase for a philosophical materialist like Fidel? Or does spirit mean volition?
First sentence: “the unique and fundamental condition of this time is the decline of US imperialism.” What are we to make of this assessment? Is it true, either then or today?
“the weapon of theory”– Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Cuban documentarian.
Intentions: “to disrupt the empire… to incapacitate it, to put pressure on teh cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join in the world struggle. to attack from the inside”
even further: “to encourage the people, etc.” Who are/ What is “the people”? The language of American democracy.
section: “The Banner of Che”
Not to fight is a way of uselessly attempting to avoid the inevitable which undermines “the people”. Again, a sense of inevitability.
Note the syllogisms. Like a kind of catechism: “Without mass strugle there can be no revolution. Without armed struggle there can be no victory.”
On the other hand, the specific form that struggle will take is contingent: “we are always figuring it out”
Invoking Che: “2, 3, many VNs”
And Black liberation
duties of specifically white revolutionaries.
section: “Why is Revolution Necessary”
What is a revolution? the world “turned upside down. It is a fight for who run things, etc.”
Explication of “a system”– i.e., Capitalism and a militarized State. Domination of other nations, peoples, workers, women, etc. but also how imperialism “intimately affects day-to-day behavior– thoughts, values, potential and hopes.”
“It is an illusion that imperialism will decay peacefully.” Is this true? What does history teach us about the end of Empires? Or is the fact that the US represents a capitalist empire give it its own set of necessities?
A dying imperialism is a dangerous thing. Imperialists will “pass their contradictions on to the people”– what does this mean?
In the Early Stages
“crises of the society provide the training grounds”
appeal to the strategy of urban guerrilla war (cf. Marighelli): “the cities will be a major battleground”
“carrying out armed struggle will affect the people’s consciousness of the nature of the struggle against the state”– practice provokes and informs consciousness, which changes the nature of practice.
Note the dialectical (chiasmatic) structure of the following line: “Revolutionary action generates revolutionary consciousness; growing consciousness develops revolutionary action.”
Contradictions of the present (1974):
“We live in a whirlwind; nonetheless, tmie is on the side of the guerrillas.”
“Armed actions…. must be clearly understandable to the people, identify our enemy precisely, and overcome his massive lies and propaganda”
the dangers of spectacularity, of political action and violence as a spectacle to be consumed by passive masses.
“a continuum between guerrilla and mass work”: different forms of battle. “acts of resistance… mass demonstrations… demands for control and power through seizures of institutions… clandestine propaganda… popular rebellion… outrage expressed violently and collectively”
still room for freaks. building counter-institutions, establishing “liberated zones”
The Sixties
“Denunciations of the struggles of the sixties as a failure do the enemy’s work.”
Achievements
“Desanctification of the empire”– unraveling the myth of invulnerability.
“forces unleased at Little Rock and Montgomery and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution”: linking domestic civil rights and “foreign” revolutions– creating a continuity between struggles
“Material contribution to Vietnamese history”
“interruptions in the functioning of the draft”– i.e., the draft is unreliable b/c it stokes domestic unrest. Thus, today, 2009, in the 8th year of war and occupation, there is no draft. Here is a lesson the state learned quite well.
“Opposition to racism”: the 60s pushed anti-racism farther than ever. African American struggle leads the way. “Black people as a colonized and oppressed people”– i.e., the 3W in the 1W.
“Growth of insurgent cultures”– the counterculture, with echoes of the Beats: “fighting to be human beings in the midst of disgusting and crusing social forms”.
“imperialism sought to tame its youth thru tracked education, the draft, the oppression of women”– these are some examples of what Althusser would call the Ideological State Apparatus.
“profound alienation in work, school, family”: the institutions which reproduce social life in order to retain the status quo.
“The overthrowing of rotten values of male supremacy, consumerism, passivity, respectability and the rat race, was a wonderful advance.”
Feminism.
“Challenge to inaction. We inherited a deadening ideology of conformity and gradualism.”
Learning US history is instrumental in radicalization.
“Turning Point”
The world-historical moment of 1968: a conjuncture. Palestine, France, Vietnam, Latin America, China. Uprisings after the murder of Dr. King.
The breakthrough of understanding imperialism as a kind of etiology or grand narrative. The complicity of institutions such as universities in the MIC: “The same school which tracked students… turned out to own slums… and to develop anti-personal weapons and strategies against revolution– to be in fact a tool of the corporations and the military.”
To the point that, at present, the structure of the University– let’s say SJSU– is indistinguishable from a corporation.
SDS, Columbia Revolt, DNC in Chicago, etc.
The outcome/process of personal transformation. Carl Oglesby: “The rebel is someon who has changed.”
COINTELPRO. The State actively targets dissidents. Spying, intimidation, physical violence, assassination.
RYM as a temporary measure.
Struggle against economism w/in the Movement: “the reduction of revolution to a struggle for purely economic gains”– ex. AFL vs. IWW.
Necessity of confronting white privilege: “It is difficult to synthesize militant anti-imperialism with a mass base among oppressor-nation people because off the whole fabric of relative social/material white-skin privilege”. Acknowledging a history of white working-class selling out their non-white class allies.
“Student power” was insufficient b/c it “ignored the claims of university workers, the community, the 3W people”.
The importance of unity of struggle.
Feminism transformed the Movement.
Self-Criticism
as a revolutionary practice: “errors must first be recognized and corrected”
initial stages “impolite, rough, disruptive, disorderly” though “essential”
the sin of vanguardism: “we let go of our identification with the people– the promise, the yearnings, the defeats”
arrogance: dismissing those unwilling or unable to go underground/ pick up the gun. missed opportunity to guide and strengthen mass movements.
“uncritical support of youth culture” (cf. freaks/revolutionaries)
What We Think
“Our method is dialectical materialism.”
Appeal to 2W– a billion socialists.
VN defeat “ended the era of world hegemony for the US”. And what do we think of this statement in the present context?
Dialectics: “The imposition of foreign rule and foreign exploitation has created the conditions which gave birth to movements for national liberation– the seeds of imperialism’s destruction.”
Again, a very Hegelian understanding of history, of history as an arrow headed in a specific, even unavoidable, direction.
“As colonized nations liberate themselves, imperialism’s ability to maintain a stable economy and ideological hegemony over its own people crumbles.” Does it/ Has it?
“the overall crisis and decline of imperialism is permanent and ongoing”
“Revolution is a dialectical process of destruction and creation.” As is capitalism.
A definition of socialism on p. 266
Last paragraph: read together. Utopian. Hegelian. Humanist.
‘What’s Going On’ is Not a Question: The Long 60s from Decolonization to Wattstax
Concepts
“the long 60s”
conjuncture
world-historical
“revolution in the revolution”
cultural revolution
counterculture
re-spatio-temporalization (spatio-temporal practices)
prefigurative politics
alienation vs. oppression
violence
“smash monogamy”
“Days of Rage” (Oct. 8-11, 1969)
“Bring the War Home”
COINTELPRO
Quotes
“Revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the mass of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order, as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the limited, philistine yardsticks of gradualist progress”
– Lenin (1905)
“If you allow a lot of young people to do nothing for a few years but read books and talk to each other then it is possible that given certain wider historical circumstances, they will not only begin to question some of the values transmitted to them but begin to interrogate the authority by which they are transmitted.”
– Terry Eagleton
“ I suppose, if Malcolm X were alive today, they would kill him.”
–Kevin Alexander Gray (2004)
“Doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence.”
–Naomi Jaffee
“Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism because fascism will stop us all.”
–Fred Hampton
“The first stage of the black freedom movement in the 60s– the civil rights struggle– began as a black response to white violent attacks and took the form of a critique of everyday life in the American South. The critique primariliy consisted of attacking everyday cultural folkways that insulted black dignity. It was generated, in part, from the mulitfarious effects of economic transformation of dispossessed southern rural peasants into downtrodden industrial workers, maids, and unemployed city dwellers within the racist American South. In this regard, the civil rights movment prefigured the fundamental concerns of the American New Left: linking private troubles, accenting the relation of cultural hegemony to political control and economic exploitation.”
–Cornel West
“The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution. We know that in America and throughout the world the revolution will be victorious. But revolutionaries cannot sit in the doorways of their homes to watch the corpse of imperialism pass by. The role of Job does not behoove a revolutionary. Each year by which America’s liberation may be hastened will mean millions of children rescued from death, millions of minds, freed for learning, infinitudes of sorrow spared the peoples.”
–Castro (1962)
“I experienced my oppression as the inability to grasp anything real beyond my own subjectivity. I was in revolt against the experience of unreality.”
– Osha Neumann (NYC Motherfuckers)
“No Frozen Moments For Tomorrow’s Fantasy Revolution!”
– Slogan of the Free City Diggers (1968)
The nihilist
He wore his pants
tapered,
hip. He dug Hemingway
too. But his father
said glumly
“Son, your taste
is un-Russian…”
Thus he saddened
his family
hard-working
boosters of output—
all the time
arguing with them
about weird
predilections.
—Yevgeni Yevtushenko (1960)
“ The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new family, the University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence, apparently, lies in a direct subservience to the two most powerful systems of social control: the family and the State. He is their well-behaved and grateful child, and like the submissive child he is overeager to please. He celebrates all the values and mystifications of the system, devouring them with all the anxiety of the infant at the breast.”
–Situationist International
“A little less conversation, a little more action.”
– Elvis Presley
“The acid experience is so concrete. It draws a line right across your life– before and after LSD– in the same way you felt that your step into radical politics drew a sharp division. People talked about that, the change you go through, how fast the change could happen on an individual level and how liberating and glorious it was. Change was seen as survival, as the strategy of health. Nothing could stand for that overall sense of going through profound change so well as the immediate, powerful and explicit transformation that you went through when you dropped acid. In the same way, bursting through the barricades redefined you as a new person. It’s not necessarily that the actual content of the LSD experience contributed to politically radical or revolutionary consciousness– it was just that the experience shared the structural characteristics of political rebellion, and resonated those changes so that the two became interdependent prongs of an over-arching transcending rebellion that took in the person and the State at the same time.”
– Carl Oglesby, “On Revolution”
“Finally you just split if you couldn’t cope.”
– former Love Child/ Acid Freak (now a roofer and parent living in california)
“What is a revolutionary? Someone who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.”
–Albert Camus
“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”
–Ronald Reagan, 4/7/70
“They felt it’s just, ‘they’re assholes and we’re the heroes.’”
Anthony Bonza, NYPD
“Fuck ‘em.”
– Abbie Hoffman
“Democracy is in the streets.”
– SDS slogan
“I come all over the pavement.”
– grafitti on Paris wall, May 1968
The Long 60s Timeline
1957
Independence of Ghana
Little Rock 9
Civil Rights Act (gives Justice dept. greater authority in elections)
Battle of Algiers
EEC (Rome).
“The Cat in the Hat”, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
SCLC founded (Atlanta, GA)
“Jailhouse Rock”, Elvis Presley/ “Haitian Fight Song”, Charles Mingus
“The White Negro”, Norman Mailer
1958
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater founded.
“Howl”, Allen Ginsberg.
“Good Golly Miss Molly“, Little Richard/ “Johnny B. Goode”, Chuck Berry.
Charlie Starkweather/ Caril Ann Fugate.
“Lolita”, Vladimir Nabokov.
US Army fieldtests an experimental weapon: soldiers at Ft. Bragg, NC engage in wargames under the influence of LSD.
1959
Raisin in the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry) appears on Broadway.
Motown Records (Detroit)/ Stax Records (Memphis).
“The 400 Blows”, Francois Truffaut.
“Starship Troopers”, Robert Heinlein.
Urban Renewal in New Haven displaces thousands.
Production and distribution of the Barbie Doll begins.
“What’d I Say”, Ray Charles/ “Kind of Blue”, Miles Davis.
1960
“Fool in Love”, Tina Turner/ “Gee Whiz”, Carla Thomas
First widely known sit-ins (Greensboro, SC)
Anti-HUAC demonstrations in SF.
SNCC founded.
African Decolonization : French Cameroon, Togo, the Malagasy Republic (Madagascar), the Independent Congo Republic, Somalia, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
Freedom Riders challenge segregation of interstate travel.
69 anti-apartheid demonstrators killed in the Sharpeville massacre (South Africa).
1961
Lumumba murdered. (Congo)
First man in space, Yuri Gagarin (USSR)
Berlin Wall.
“Last Night”, The Mar-Keys/ “You Don’t Miss Your Water”, William Bell
1962
Port Huron Statement (SDS)
James Meridith becomes the first black student to attend Ole Miss.
First American to orbit the earth, John Glenn.
“The Fire Next Time”, James Baldwin.
“Green Onions”, Booker T and the MG’s/ “These Arms of Mine”, Otis Redding/ “Be Your Own Judge”, Joe Tex
1963
“Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Assassination of Medgar Evers (Mississippi)
Black rebellion in Birmingham, Alabama after a church bombing kills four young girls.
Fall of Diem in Saigon.
Liberation Front of Quebec (FLQ).
“Live at the Apollo”, James Brown/ “Wipe Out”, Surfaris/ “We Shall Overcome”, Joan Baez.
Assassination of JFK (Dallas, TX)
“The Outsiders,” Howard Becker.
First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova (USSR).
“Wretched of the Earth”, Frantz Fanon.
1964
Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam.
Free Speech Movement (Berkeley, CA)
Freedom Summer (Mississippi). 3 anti-racism activists murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.
US-backed right-wing coup overthrows Brazilian president and establishes a dictatorship.
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party crashes the Democratic National Convention.
Gulf of Tonkin “incident” provides a pretext for the acceleration of the Vietnam War.
“This Little Light of Mine”, Fannie Lou Hamer/ “A Love Supreme”, John Coltrane/ “The Times They Are A-Changing”, Bob Dylan.
1964 Civil Rights Act, which Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) deems a “threat to the very essence of our basic system”.
MLK, Jr. receives Nobel Peace Prize
“One Dimensional Man”, Herbert Marcuse (Los Angeles, CA)
GI Joe doll introduced. In 1969, Joe– newly available in black and white colors– demilitarized and became an “adventurer” who battled the elements rather than killing other dolls. Even so, the toy was discontinued in 1976, only to be re-introduced in the Reagan 80s (1982) with a new (“Real American Hero” series) look.
1965
The 1st Marine Division lands in Da Nang (Vietnam).
Sustained bombing campaign (“Rolling Thunder”) of North Vietnam.
US invades Dominican Republic with 20,000 troops.
“Man and Socialism in Cuba”, Ernesto Guevara.
First teach-ins at U of Michigan (Ann Arbor).
Augustus Stanley Owsley III completes his first batch of LSD.
“Dancing in the Street”, Martha and the Vandellas/ “A Change is Gonna Come”, Sam Cooke/ “Satisfaction”, Rolling Stones
Watts explosion (Los Angeles)
“The Colonizer and the Colonized”, Albert Memmi.
LBJ’s Great Society Program
Malcolm X assassinated.
After a series of long and arduous strikes, California farm workers (UFW) organize an international grape boycott that lasts five years (“La Causa”).
Sukarno is overthrown in Indonesia; hundreds of thousands of communists are murdered in the aftermath.
Cultural Revolution begins (China)
TV premiere of “Get Smart”, a series that satirized cold war espionage, pitting the evil KAOS against Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, of CONTROL
“Bloody Sunday” in Selma.
Amiri Baraka and others form the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School.
Drop City commune founded “on six acres of scraggly goat pasture outside Trinidad, CO”.
1966
Black Panther Party for Self Defense (Oakland)
James Meredith’s “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson
“The Little Red Book,” Mao Zedong.
Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power speech
“For Marx”, Louis Althusser
Formation of the Underground Press Syndicate.
Star Trek and The Monkees first air.
First celebration of Kwanzaa.
“The Ballad of the Green Beret”, Barry Sadler/ “Crosscut Saw”, Albert King/ “River Deep, Mountain High”, Tina Turner.
The sustained bombing of Hanoi causes massive civillian casualties.
Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” is anybody “25 and under”.
Mastercard and Bankamericard intitiate the credit card revolution.
1967
“Respect”, Aretha Franklin (orig. by Otis Redding)
MLK, Jr. condemns the American War in Vietnam and calls the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.
Muhammed Ali stripped of title for refusing induction in the army.
The CIA launches Operation Chaos, spying on US activists.
“Revolution in the Revolution”, Regis Debray.
Black uprisings throughout the United States.
Monterey Pop Festival.
“Message to the Tricontinental”. Within the year Che Guevara murdered in Bolivia.
Left Coast: Summer of Love, First Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, The Diggers celebrate “The Death of Hippie”.
“Battle of Algiers”, Gillo Pontecorvo.
FBI launches COINTELPRO.
“The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual”, Harold Cruse.
“Tiger Force”, a 45 member Army reconaissance platoon, roams the Central Highlands of Vietnam from May to November, killing hundreds of unarmed civillians.
Edward Brooke (R-Mass) becomes the first African-American senator since Reconstruction, almost 100 years before.
“Society of the Spectacle”, Guy Debord.
1968
Shirley Chisolm elected to Congress.
Prague Spring
Student uprisings in Warsaw, Mexico City, Tokyo, Delhi, New York, Paris, Berlin, etc.
“Police riot” at the Democratic National Convention.
RFK assassinated.
American Indian Movement (AIM).
MLK, Jr. assassinated. Black rebellions in cities throughout the US.
“Soul on Ice”, Eldridge Cleaver
May ‘68: France comes the closest to revolution of any western democracy in the 20th century. Workers and students unite.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos make Black Power salutes while receiving their medals at the Mexico City Olympics. (Their medals are revoked).
Lincoln High School “Blowouts” (Los Angeles).
Marijuana arrests in California rise 324%
First ATM.
“Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing”, Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka.
1969
League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Detroit)
Liberation of Alcatraz Island.
Young Lords (NYC), Weatherman (Flint, Michigan), SF Red Guards, MEChA, Brown Berets (Los Angeles), Bread and Roses (Boston), Redstockings (NYC).
End of the Cultural Revolution
Murder of Fred Hampton and others.
First human on the moon (US)
Days of Rage in Chicago.
“Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla”, Carlos Marighella (Brazil).
Trial of the Chicago 8 (later 7 when Bobby Seale’s trial is separated from the other defendants’)
After campaigning on a “law and order” platform, Nixon narrowly defeats Hubert Humphrey and takes office.
“The Wild Bunch”, Sam Peckinpah.
Liberation of People’s Park followed by the occupation of Berkeley. Gov. Reagan: “If they want a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”
Panther 21 indicted.
“Homecoming”, Sonia Sanchez.
US begins secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos.
The internet.
“Okie from Muskogee”, Merle Haggard/ “This is Madness”, Last Poets.
1970
Kent State/ Jackson State murders.
Jonathan Jackson killed.
“Soledad Brother”, George Jackson
“What’s Goin On”, Marvin Gaye/ “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow”, Funkadelic.
First Earth Day.
Baader-Meinhof Group (Red Army Fraction)
Salvador Allende becomes the first democratically elected marxist leader in the western hemisphere (Chile).
US invades Cambodia.
“THX-1138”, George Lucas.
1971
Attica Prison Rebellion
George Jackson killed.
US voting age lowered to 18.
US goes off the gold standard (effectively ending the Treaty of Bretton Woods).
“There’s a Riot Goin On”, Sly and the Family Stone/ “Shaft”, Isaac Hayes/ “What’s Goin On“, Marvin Gaye
Weatherman launches a string of attacks on government and corporate targets.
In D.C., 500,000 people demonstrate against the war in Vietnam.
School desegregation leads to racist violence.
Winter Soldier Investigation (Detroit).
Christiania founded when Danes take possession of a former miliary base in the center of Copenhagen.
1972
Equal Rights Amendment falls 3 votes short of ratification.
“Mumbo Jumbo”, Ishmael Reed.
England occupies Northern Ireland. ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre in Londonderry.
US continues a devastating bombing campaign in North Vietnam as it withdraws its ‘last combat troops’.
Watergate burlaries.
Gloria Steinem founds Ms. magazine.
“Superfly”, Curtis Mayfield/ “I’ll Take You There”, Staples Singers.
1973
Seige of Wounded Knee (Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota)
Affirmative action.
“Raw Power”, The Stooges/ “Love Train”, O’Jays.
Roe v. Wade.
“Return to the Source“, Amilcar Cabral.
Overthrow, with extensive US support, of Chile’s Popular Unity Government.
War Powers Resolution passed over Nixon’s veto.
“The Open Veins of Latin America”, Eduardo Galleano.
Ferdinand Marcos becomes “President for Life” of the Philippines.
“Energy Crisis” in western nations leads to “stagflation”.
Henry Kissinger/ Le Duc Tho awarded the Nobel peace prize.
1974
“You Haven’t Done Nothing”, Stevie Wonder/ ”Jungle Boogie,” by Kool and the Gang/ “Tangled Up in Blue,” by Bob Dylan
“Carnation Revolution” in Portugal.
SLA kidnaps Patricia Hearst (Berkeley).
“Oreo”, Fran Ross.
Top-rated TV shows: All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, The Jeffersons.
“Angela Davis: An Autobiography”
1975
Independence of Angola and Mozambique.
Microsoft founded.
“Mothership Connection”, Parliament/ “Low Rider”, War/ “Born to Run”, Bruce Springsteen.
“Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism”, Weather Underground Organization (WUO)
The Weather Underground
